Sunday, January 4, 2015

I Don't Need No Stinkin' Resolutions For A Writing Schedule!

New Year's resolutions are for the birds. It's like making a wish list of things that you would like to do, but really, they aren't important enough to simply execute and make them a normal part of your life. You have to make a list as if to remind yourself why they were important at the beginning of the year.

Some people do take the resolutions very seriously and accomplish things but many of us allow them to fall by the wayside for one reason or another and then later in the year become depressed because we didn't accomplish everything that we put on the list.

So I don't make resolutions when the new year flips over. I learned long ago that I don't value them. What I have always done is set goals but not at the new year. Every three to four months I assess what is going on and what I need to do. So I have quarterly goals, annual goals, and a five year goals that are always in flux because life can sometimes throw some curve balls.

Now goals can be interrupted. but if that happens, I don't trash them. I simply reset when I think they can be accomplished. The beginning of 2014 was tumultuous with the debacle that Silver Publishing turned out to be. I had been working for months to get my rights back to all five of my books and trying to start anew some place else. But even with as crazy as everything was, I still had goals.

Today I'm redoing my agenda. This is last year's white board of my goals (please excuse the doggy tail swishes) and if you've followed my releases you know that Keeping Faith was finished and actually released in November but what about everything else?

Well, let's roll down the list. The Soul of an Animal Like Me was put on the back burner. It is a part of a trilogy that is a spin off of I.O.N. With the uncertainty of Silver I couldn't justify working in this when it possibly wouldn't see the light of day. It is halfway finished.

Fate and Destinies is finished. It's been sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to get the time to actually do the self-edits. It's about 110k which would take me quite a long time to do line edits so I keep pushing it back. I plan to get to it sometime this year.

Under the 2014 agenda area. Elite Ops *laughing* Yeah, that one was a bust because I couldn't come up with a storyline that I wanted to write. What I did test out, the feed back came back that the Ops dude was pretty unlikable because the plot I had in mind had him walking away from the love of his life without a good reason for staying away. So that plot was let go but I'm holding onto the characters. Usually I can find another story line for unattached characters or add them to existing series.

Druids of Sanctuary I wanted to be a love triangle trilogy but Emery was showing a preference so I had to go back to the drawing board and rework some things. Yeah, it's still sitting on the drawing board.

Bespoken was supposed to be book 3 in a 4 book series but there was a problem with things that had to happen in order to accomplish everything in the fourth book. I decided that instead of telling what happened that I would show. This added three books to the Valespian Pact series. Now the line up is Bespoken, Chosen, Rebirth, Boundless, and Legends. If I can come up with a viable love story for Mestor then there will be a standalone for him, Kindred. I spent a great deal of time with research on this series and Bespoken is ready. It's a part of the 2015 lineup.

One More Night is a bittersweet flash fiction that I thought about fleshing out and nothing is coming to mind so it will stay as it is.

Beginning Again is the reworking of Leap of Faith, a fluffy freebie I wrote a couple of years ago. I was going to leave it as is but received some great feedback on this that made me rethink and I began to expand it and change the areas that were off. It's contemporary and I'm not as confident when writing this genre but it's not shelved.

Elemental Guardians (Fantasy/Sci-Fi), Rescue and Rehab (Sci-Fi), Half Breed (New Adult/Paranormal), Dating Guide (Urban Fantasy) are all still on my agenda and I will get to but first I need to complete the series that I already have so these were moved to the waiting list.

At first glance, it would appear that I didn't get much accomplished, other than Keeping Faith. Not so. I completed The Aurora Conspiracy and it will come out sometime this year. There were a lot of words put into manuscripts that are in the works. Homes were found for Sumeria's Sons and I.O.N.Sumeria's Sons has a re-release schedule. Striker was released. Alpha Trine received the Rainbow Award. And I went to two conventions as an author. The last quarter of 2014 I lost my father which put a host of issues in my path that I had to deal with, setting aside my agenda for the quarter. I had planned to have Dragon's Eye and Releasing Chaos finished before the end of the year but that's what happens sometimes.

This next quarter I plan on finishing the Sumeria's Sons series. I'm about 30k into Dragon's Eye. I estimated it would be around 100k about I'm almost at the half way point so I'm looking at more like 70k instead.

Releasing Chaos will wrap up the story of Tristan, Ushna, and Nikita. I had always planned for there to be two spinoffs of Sumeria's Sons. Sumeria's Children and Sumeria's Magi but these will have to wait until I've completed one or both of the other series.

I need to finish the self edits for Werewolf's Tale & A Druid's Sword. Then I can submit to LT3.

Bespoken and Chosen come next and then the 3rd book in the I.O.N. series.

Fate And Destinies needs the editing and then I need to find out were to send it or if I want to self publish.

The bonus fun for this year is working on the world building for the insect shifter - In This Skin (Sci-Fi) story. This is sort of a challenge to get readers to look past the shifted form and find someone to root for. It's been really fun to put the components together.

The other bonus is the fantasy story that is sort of a twisted Red Riding Hood mixed with some midrash. Reapers, assassins, and hunters in a series called Cain's Redhoods. There's about 6k in the first story, Show Me Your Teeth. Lots of world building needs to be done, maybe two or three stories in this world.

Maybe the writing schedule doesn't seem aggressive but since none of these are short stories I think it's pretty good. I'm looking at writing at least 600,000 words this year, if not more. Certainly nothing to sneeze at but it also gives me the family time that I've given up these last couple of years. I have to find that balance or I'll hate being an author and that's the last thing that I want.

About Me

Lexi has always been an avid reader and at a young age started reading (secretly) her mother’s romances (the ones she was told not to touch). She was the only teenager she knew of who would be grounded from reading. Later, with a pencil and a note book, she wrote her own stories and shared them with friends because she loved to see their reactions. A Texas transplant, Lexi now kicks her boots up in the Midwest with her Yankee husband and her 80 lbs. puppies named after vacuum cleaners.
Website: http://www.lexiander.com
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